Decision making framework for an earthquake resistant building

Abstract

Earthquake is a natural disaster that is resulted from the abrupt movements on faults or fractures in Earth’s lithosphere. The destruction that an earthquake causes depends on its magnitude and duration, or the amount of shaking that occurs. A structure’s design and the materials used in its construction also affect the amount of damage the structure incurs. Earthquakes vary from small, imperceptible shaking to large shocks that can be felt over thousands of kilometers. Earthquakes can deform the ground, making buildings and structures collapse. Lives may be lost as a result of destruction. Malaysia is a country with very low seismic activity. However, Malaysia is bordered by Philippines and Indonesia, which are two of the most seismically active countries and certain degree of surface waves could still be felt in our country. Most of the buildings in our country may not consider seismic load during structure design, thus the level of safety remains unknown. Recently, earthquake events have become more frequent. Therefore, engineers have to be alert and kept updated with the knowledge and behavior of earthquake trend in this area. It is vital to assess the precaution measures that can be taken and consider them in the future building design. Therefore, a decision making framework in designing earthquake resistant building especially for school building in Malaysia is needed to help engineers to consider earthquake risk in the building design. This framework employed NERA Program with the assistance of SAP2000 software for analysis of the performance of earthquake resistant building. The proposed framework is then used to verify an actual school project. The verification found that the school building is subjected to additional seismic load during earthquake but the school building structure is still capable of resisting the additional load incurred. This is because the structural capacity for that building is relatively high